Tuesday, April 08, 2014

A foggy spring day

The first signs of new growth are appearing around Roundtop Mountain! This morning I saw the leaves of the (pick one) 1) yellow dog-toothed violet 2) yellow trout lily 3) adder’s tongue 4) fawn lily were up. No signs of flower stems yet though. And the leaves of the one-day wonder, the bloodroot, are also breaking through the ground. That’s pretty impressive, considering I still had snow on the ground a week ago.

The robins are singing, as are the juncos, who will soon be heading north again. More phoebes have arrived and call from both sides of the cabin. I also had a pair of golden-crowned kinglets at the cabin this weekend. I didn’t see any insects, but they were busy little things, so I’m sure they found something. It took me a while to identify them. They like to be in the higher branches of the trees, so I never get very good views of them, even with 10x binoculars, and seeing more than their bellies takes a bit of luck.

Mud remains everywhere, as are puddles and gushing seasonal streams. With the amount of water through these temporary streams, right now it’s hard to imagine that they won’t run all year long, but they don’t. Last night I saw a frog, too, my first of the year. It hopped in front of my headlights as I was heading back to the cabin after dark and was gone before could get out of the car to find out what kind it was. It wasn’t small enough to be a peeper or large enough to be a bullfrog. It was the size of a green frog or leopard or pickerel frog.

Spring may have arrived later than usual, but the season is doing its best to catch up.

6 comments:

Catching up here, too, further east on the Piedmont. We've had bloodroots blooming, but that's about it so far (except for the dreaded lesser celandine, of course).

Even though we've had quite a bit of precipitation, it's surprisingly not very soggy around here except in areas where the water always puddles.

We've had a wildlife photographer on our grounds for the last three days taking pictures of our turkeys. He's from northern California and is writing a book about the gallinaceous game birds of North America. He'd heard that our flock of turkeys was habituated to humans and easy to photograph, so he flew out here to take advantage of our star-struck gobblers, which have begun to put on their annual mating show.

Scott: how funny that you have the tamest turkeys in America--so tame that photographers come from California to take their photos! Turkeys are funny birds. I had a flock of them in the front yard of the biggest house in the township yesterday. The tom was strutting his stuff for all he was worth while the ladies watched from a respectful distance on a little hillock.

About Me

I live in a cabin in the forests of Pennsylvania. I write about what I see and do in the natural world around me. I've been a hawkwatcher for more than 20 years, a birder for longer than that, and a crayfish-catcher since I was a polywog.